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Veteran actor Mumtaz recalled a conversation that she had with the late Madhubala, about her relationship with Dilip Kumar. Madhubala worked with him on the legendary film Mughal-e-Azam, and the two were one of Hindi cinema’s most iconic pairs, both on and off the screen. Her sister said in an interview once that they would’ve gotten married were it not for a court case that she filed against director BR Chopra; it caused a rift between the couple. However, Mumtaz said in a new interview that they broke up because she couldn’t have children.
Speaking to journalist Vickey Lalwani, Mumtaz recalled, “She didn’t break up with him. He broke up with her because she couldn’t have children. Instead, he married Saira Banu, who is a very nice person. She took such great care of him till his dying breath. She was his fan originally. They had a huge age difference, but these things don’t matter when you’re in love.”
She continued, “Nobody can ever doubt that she was madly in love with him. She was madly in love with him. But Dilip saab ko aulaad chahiye thi (Dilip saab wanted a child, you see). Perhaps it was in this desperation to have a child that he married Saira. Madhubala told me herself. I would go to meet her, and she was not well at all. She would say, ‘If I ever loved anyone in my life, it was Yusuf. But when he found out that I can’t conceive…’ She would call him Yusuf. The doctor told her that she would die in childbirth, because of her heart problem.”
Mumtaz said that she doesn’t blame Dilip Kumar for what he did, because every man wants a child. “Despite being in love with her, he might have thought, ‘Let me try with another woman’. It’s so tragic that he didn’t have a child with Saira as well,” she said, adding that Saira is a ‘sweetheart’. She added, “I feel sorry for Saira, she’s a wonderful person. If they had a child, she would’ve been taken care of too.”
Madhubala and Dilip Kumar were together for nearly a decade. They also worked together on the films Tarana, Amar and Sangdil. After he tied the knot with Saira Banu, they met at her insistence. “Soon after our nikah (marriage), while we were staying in Madras, I received a message from Madhubala that she wished to see me urgently. I confided in Saira as soon as we returned to Bombay about the message. Saira at once insisted that I should meet Madhu since it must be something she was distressed about,” he recalled in his autobiography.
Madhubala eventually married Kishore Kumar, but that relationship ended in tragedy as well. She died at the age of 36 in the year 1969. Dilip Kumar died at the age of 98 in 2021.
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